The CBI and the Enforcement Directorate have arrested six persons, including two officials of a Bank of Baroda branch in Delhi in connection with Rs 6,000 crore alleged illegal remittances to Hong Kong through the bank.
The CBI sources said AGM S.K. Garg and Jainish Dubey, who headed the foreign exchange division at BoB’s branch in Ashok Vihar were arrested for criminal conspiracy, cheating and provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
On the other side, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested four persons, including an HDFC bank employee, in connection with the case.
The ED arrested Kamal Kalra, working with the foreign exchange division of HDFC bank, Chandan Bhatia, Gurucharan Singh Dhawan and Sanjay Aggarwal in Delhi.
The CBI FIR had alleged that “59 current account holders and unknown bank officials conspired to send overseas remittances, mostly to Hong Kong, of foreign exchange worth approximately Rs 6,000 crore in illegal and irregular manner in violation of established banking norms under the garb of payments towards suspected non-existent imports”.
The CBI sources had found that the Ashok Vihar branch of the bank was a relatively new one, which had got the permission to entertain forex transactions only in 2013.
The agency had said these remittances were sent by splitting them into amounts below one lakh USD to avoid automatic detection by software used by banks to alert them about such transactions.
The CBI found that an estimated Rs 6,000 crore was transferred through nearly 8,000 transactions done between July, 2014 and July, 2015.
